moniquemeloche is pleased to present Lavar Munroe: DANCE WITH MY FATHER AGAIN, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Munroe is an interdisciplinary artist from Nassau, Bahamas whose work spans painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, collage, and assemblage. Working with an expansive range of materials including paint, cardboard, feathers, glass, found objects, textiles, newspaper, and discarded cultural artifacts, Munroe constructs richly layered worlds that merge folklore, spirituality, personal memory, and collective history.
Munroe’s exhibition emerges from research developed for The Bahamas Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 2026, which recently opened to rave reviews, and centers on an intergenerational dialogue between Munroe and the late Bahamian artist John Beadle – who are both deeply shaped by Bahamian culture and particularly the traditions of Junkanoo, the national festival known for its processions, elaborate handmade costumes, music, improvisation, and collective production. Following Beadle's death in 2024, Munroe developed works that engage Beadle's legacy, incorporating aspects of his artistic philosophy, collected materials, sketches, and influence. DANCE WITH MY FATHER AGAIN extends Munroe’s ongoing exploration of posthumous collaboration while marking a deeply personal return to continue an unrealized project conceived with his late father.
Before his father's passing, Munroe envisioned a collaboration centered on the parachutes his father— a Junkanooer, fisherman, and boatsman—washed, repaired, and braided by hand. Recognizing their sculptural beauty, Munroe hoped to present the parachutes as artworks and respond to them through his own visual language, creating a dialogue between two makers connected by a shared understanding of material transformation. Although his father's death interrupted the project, the collaboration sustained as Munroe incorporated these objects into subsequent installations, sculptures, and drawings, allowing his father's presence to remain an active force within the work.
This exhibition marks a return to the origins of that conversation through a series of unstretched paintings on canvas. While earlier projects relied on inherited objects as collaborators, these paintings position memory itself as the medium of exchange for which the artist navigates loss, celebration, and lasting connection. Central to these works is the Bahamian tradition of shared mourning, where movement, coordinated dress, and united visual markers transform grief into a communal act. The figures depicted here are "rushing", a term associated with participation in Junkanoo processions moving through spaces that are at once celebratory and elegiac. Layers of Bahamian newspapers from 2024 to 2026 function as both historical record and a fragmented archive, preserving traces of specific moments that emerge and disappear beneath successive layers of paint, fringe, beads, sequins, and decorative elements derived from Junkanoo costume-making traditions. The surface feels simultaneously celebratory and weathered, echoing the handmade exuberance of Junkanoo while preserving the residue of lived experience and ritual.
Taken together, the works in DANCE WITH MY FATHER AGAIN revisit the relationship that first inspired Munroe's notion of posthumous collaboration. Here, Munroe deftly showcases painting as a space in which communication, remembrance, and artistic partnership can be shaped by the enduring presence of ancestors, community, and shared history.
